It has long been known to produce snack foods of various compositions. Improved and new compositions are desirable to meet changing market demands. In particular, there is perceived market demand for low calorie snack foods having pleasant taste, appearance, and texture. For example, numerous different soft baked bars with a fruit filling are commercially available.
Dough sheeting is a common method for producing layers of dough for baked products including cookies, crackers, pastries, biscuits, pasta, cereal pieces, pizza crusts and various other similar items. Sheets of dough may be produced by depositing generally homogeneously mixed dough onto a conveyor belt and feeding it between at least two counter-rotating rollers that each extend across the conveyor width. The rollers compress the dough into a sheet of predetermined thickness and the dough sheet is transported by the moving conveyor belt for further processing.
Dough sheets may be reduced to a specific thickness by the process of calibration. Calibration involves passing a dough sheet through a set of counter-rotating rollers set an exact distance from each other. The thickness of the calibrated dough sheet may be monitored, for example by a laser probe. The measurement is performed to ensure that the dough sheet is being accurately calibrated and the gap between the rollers can be adjusted as needed.
Lamination is the process of creating a laminate, which is an item that has two or more layers joined together. The layers may be composed of the same materials, such as wood pieces in plywood, or different materials, such as plastic film heat bonded around a sheet of paper. In the food industry, a laminated snack bar may include a layer of fruit filling compressed between two layers of dough sheets.
Thus, while snack food structures and compositions according to the prior art provide a number of advantageous features, they nevertheless have certain limitations. For example, a common problem with laminated, filled food products, such as snack bars, is that moisture from the filling is often absorbed by the adjacent dough layers. This is normally undesirable as the dough layers become soggy. The present invention seeks to overcome certain of these limitations and other drawbacks of the prior art, and to provide new features not heretofore available. Accordingly it is desirable to provide a laminated low calorie snack bar that simultaneously includes cracker-like layers of dough and a moist middle layer of filling. The filling remains soft without causing the crunchy dough layers to become soggy. Additional features and advantages of the invention or of certain embodiments of the invention will be apparent to those of skill in the art from the following disclosure and description of exemplary embodiments.